


if(duality.getStrider()!=null){~ATH}

by nauseouma



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Child Neglect, Dave's Bro | Beta Dirk Strider's Bad Parenting, Freeform, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Light Angst, Minor Character Death, Moving On, Past Child Abuse, Pesterlog(s) (Homestuck)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-08
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-12 11:40:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28634862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nauseouma/pseuds/nauseouma
Summary: Homestuck Page 3698.Bro is dead and Dave realises that aspiring heroism never meant to conquer mortality or one's flaws.
Relationships: Dave's Bro | Beta Dirk Strider & Dave Strider
Kudos: 2





	if(duality.getStrider()!=null){~ATH}

Dave: Answer.

You are now Dave Strider. But first, try to acknowledge Bro.

the heat emitting your entire flesh prison kisses your skin in a different way than usual. it's the classic hot-cold dilemma. you clearly recognise the crisp coolness in the air but you also sweat considerably. mightn’t it be because you are looking down the cadaver of your “guardian”? more specifically, avoiding to look at it directly, just hesitantly tracing the silhouette. nah, probably not.

rather than breathing in through the unbearable and thin texas heat invading your room, or the unwanted flash heating up your face, or the near inflating tension filling you with unbearable energy and whatnot, the heat was actually leaving your body right now. floating all around you and evaporating gradually, a good inch away from the actual surface of your skin. it was literally getting cool. and physically, contact-wise you were aware of the heat’s presence, not minding that you couldn’t decipher whether it was the lava or the situation and thus bodily reaction. notwithstanding the planet’s assets, you found it eerie how it didn’t affect you as much as when it was just another reason to complain on the internet. how hot texas was in the summer. how bright it was all day. how hot and dry the air tasted, unproportional to your unrelaxed pulse.

it was a bit reliving that terezi was interrupting the moment. even if she didn't alter the apparently have-to-be morose occasion, you wouldn't know what to do. in all the time that has passed, it had never occurred to you to think about what the hell you would do once bro was gone. certainly, it should've been a blast to imagine such a thing, ponder and follow each better possible tangent that the universe could've laid out for you. however, that train of thought was off-limits before it could even be defined coherently. growing up alone could even sound like a motherfucking dream. but it’s a strange idea. just doesn’t fit. you don't seem to have been made for such an adventerous existence.

beyond those walls, it used to be unclear whether everything else was even real.

  
thinking about how stuff shouldn't have been like it was  
just feels more like stuff actually was like it shouldn't have been.

like it was actually _that_ bad.

_you just preferred to ignore how deep you were in the unclear substance soaking your clothes. how heavy it felt to move in that goddamn apartment. swirly, sticky liquid clinging to your legs, up to your knees, but you weren't looking down. standing your ground. the worry didn't lie in your legs primarily, but more in your chest. it was so hard to breathe. it was not nearly easy to move with all that stuff littered everywhere, hearing more heart thumping than gasping. they are grinning and screeching._

_bouncing from off the walls, you perceived a noise. it's embarrassing how you jumped at that and immediately felt your chest clamp together. too focused on the gurgly noise of whatever you were waddling through. don't take a peek for the love of god. he warned you about the vortex._ _no matter how good you were getting at predicting the schedule, it always surprised you how tight it was getting. dishing out training faster than you were able to solace the darkening parts that hurt the most on the areas which weren’t corneal. which, arguably, wasn't your greatest problem. the shell of a body could wither all it wanted; it was barely a representative of what you were supposed to become. after all, yours truly was sometimes courtly enough to highlight the balance between physical and psychological strength. for the sake of one day proving him wrong you continued waddling. for the actual sake of not being flattened by the enclosing walls behind you, you continued waddling._

gallowsCalibrator [GC] began pestering  turntechGodhead [TG]

GC: STR1111111D3R

TG: oh my fucking god

GC: WH4T >:?

TG: what do you mean what

TG: we just got done talking and agreed it would be awesome if you didnt bother me for a while

TG: you know like while i guess i grieved over this brutally murdered rad family member or something

brutally murdered. bro didn't even look half as bad as it used to feel when you were at the receiving end. fast, sharp and painless. also, impressive. if that half-lie was part of the cool kid taking charge or the most natural feeling sentence you’ve ever typed, it was a mystery to behold.

the stench of the blood and basically death was barely noticeable. maybe evaporating together with, or as the heat. though a dying mammal was always portrayed so gruesome and vomit-inducing, whatever earthly stench a corpse could give off was overridden by mainly confusion. your sense of orientation was all over the place.

  
pretending he ceased existing the second you and the others entered the game would've been pretty neat. so neat, it was predictable how real and sudden his all-so heroic death was. he was probably aware of this outcome. the feeling of him being in the session had never stopped crawling around your back. the anger at him figuring out stuff despite not being part of the initiating party did not ever not boil. how much more believable his hero schtick got, it's so stupid. he died trying to defeat the end boss, and strangely enough you remember his ill-tempered advices he spat at you. like the self-pious douche he was.  
yeah, you couldn't really decide what to do with the fact that that reign just came to an end. in the alpha timeline even. with the not even ironic menace, you figured bro would go out a little brighter. he probably wanted that too.

too bad the end was factually dull, with nobody but you left to look at the remains. he’d dug his own grave. if he ever let you in, under the pretense of him actually having something humane like troubles and fears, maybe the grieving wouldn’t be so superficial. you shift your attention to terezi rambling about the now consolidated non-linearity of the conversation taking place.

GC: D4V3, YOUR 3NT1R3 3X1ST3NC3 1S NONL1N34R

GC: DONT B3 SO M3LODR4M4T1C

TG: whoops ok in the future ill try not to pitch any sort of dramatics while brooding over the cadavers of slaughtered loved ones

you don't look away from the chat client, and even if, your eyes fixate on the outline of the body. despite the blurry and trivial corpse beside you, all you think about are his shades on you (2x). although that are john’s actually it still reeks of him. he probably touched them or something before you started taking paranoid showers with your glasses on.

it was his fault to make you forget how that face beneath the shades looks. always wearing those pointy shades, being non-stop unavailable, visually as emotionally. fuck thanks c man substituted enough eye contact bro never had to make up for. whatever. whether you’d regret it later on to have never checked his appearance or not, wasn’t the question. you couldn’t deal with decreasing the proximity between you and him.

GC: D1D YOU LOV3 H1M D4V3?

TG: no

ironic non-irony suddenly fell flat and didn't feel nonironically satisfying given the irony. you felt pathetic for your fingers itching to besmirch everything this concept of a brother was. you felt so utterly dirty for not letting it go even when faced with some alien that has nothing to do with it. about to burst you were, now thinking about it. for one, your dreams were always the only thing that trenchantly reminded you of how wrong everything around you was. you really did prefer to not think about the realization that bro might have been wrong the whole time. the bad guy the whole time. it made you sick how a voice inside of you still carried such a sentimental weight for bro. it was mediocre and distant, yet you still yearned to make out its words clearer. admitting bro was in the wrong felt like bro was actually in the right. doubting his techniques made you suddenly question if you were just too weak to face the facts. or maybe not. you just so unsure. both sides sounded wrong, and you really weren't in the mood for some semi-right semi-wrong half-assed bullshit.

GC: BUT H3 W4S YOUR STR4NG3 HUM4N M4N-LUSUS

GC: WHO T4UGHT YOU TO L1K3 COOL TH1NGS, L1K3 SWORDS 4ND PUPP3TS 4ND MOV1NG R34LLY F4ST!

GC: HOW COULD YOU NOT???

TG: puppets arent cool theyre shitty small fake people who haunt your dreams and grin like permanent assholes

especially cal. the worst of them all. retrospectively, tricking yourself into not minding, even liking, its presence was probably the smartest thing you had done to date. couldn’t tell if the c-man was worse or bro on the roof. which doesn’t matter since they were fucking inseparable. never wrong in assuming bro cared more about c-man than you.  
but sometimes it occurs to you that humans were perhaps conditioned to hate puppets. who in their right mind would declare little, lifeless humans as worthwhile accessories or companions? that’s like the equivalent of holding hands with a dolled-up carcass.

  
at some point, puppets were probably announced to be the very embodiment of evil and that’s exactly why bro got attached to them. out of spite to you, or simply out of a deranged obsession with the harmful, freaky and absolutely shitty. just to conquer it and be above it, yet dragging you in, in the mindset he was helping and doing you a favour.  
when actually he was just doing his very best to justify himself at his probably lowest. as well as he might have been trying to help, the possibility isn’t outlandish that he might have also just wanted to fuck with your head. since, y’know, he stood above it. way to exploit one’s stance.

TG: i was making a joke about being all broken up about it

TG: a guy can be sad and make jokes at the same time

GC: YOU 4R3 S4D, BUT NOT BROK3N UP 4BOUT 1T?

GC: 1 DONT UND3RST4ND

TG: exactly

GC: BUT YOU S41D YOU W3R3 GR13V1NG!

TG: i said we agreed youd leave me alone to grieve

TG: didnt say whether i actually would or actually am

_don’t look back, you can’t cower in your room forever. not like your room is any less putrid than the roof. at least the air on the roof is clean. and you can see the eyes in front of you when they’re usually behind your back. a loss for a gain, you optimistically force yourself to think. or desperately do so. a bit late for a fight, though. the sun was getting waterboarded at the coast of all those same-looking houses. but most of the reddish radiation flooding the tightening room seems to be absorbed by the plush._

  
_it doesn’t smell like alcohol or cigarettes in the apartment. fucked up given his behaviour. it’s just hot, god forbid an AC or airing those sweat-drenched plush asses. aside from that, it always smells the same._

GC: W3LL, 4R3 YOU?

TG: i am grieving to the max like a widow on dead husband island

TG: behind these chill as fuck shades my face is having this crazy attack of the sads

TG: my rue is fucking bananas cant you tell

GC: 4RGH NO, 1 C4NT!

GC: YOU DONT SOUND S1NC3R3, BUT 1TS SO H4RD TO T3LL WH4T L4Y3R OF 1RONY R3MOV3D FROM R34L1TY YOUR FL1PP4NT R3M4RKS 4R3 SUPPOS3D TO B3

GC: 1 4M B3TT1NG YOU R34LLY 4R3 S4D NO M4TT3R HOW H1L4R1OUS 4ND 4LOOF YOU TH1NK YOUR3 B31NG

dunno if you are. the possibility of you being is kinda real, yet given the circumstances you really don’t wanna care atm.

TG: the truth is a mystery

TG: tucked behind the pursed lips of a shitty riddler

TG: they will be loosened only when presented with the conundrous grandeur of rigid insoluble puzzlecock

GC: BLUH TH4T M4K3S NO S3NS3!

_the stairs_  
_look the same_  
_as they always do,_  
_smell the same, and  
_ _look even sultrier than_  
_the stairs to the_  
_the basement._  
_the basement stairs_  
_reminded you of dripping water_  
_coming from the poorly managed pipes._  
_he didn’t need an excuse to not_  
_do any housework._  
_or anything_  
_for that matter._  
_unspoken rule and whatnot._  
_if you could_  
_tend to your_  
_own wounds,_  
_anything else_  
_shouldn’t even be a_  
_damn debate,_  
_should it now._  
  
_all puppets do is laying around_  
_uselessly; therefore they_  
_don’t need any additional_  
_needs uncompromised._  
_how were the fucking_  
_puppets often more a topic_  
_than you or himself_  
_he warned you about_  
_the stairs but what about_

TG: im not a hero

TG: my bro was

are you admitting it or are you repeating it. you settle on admitting it. since you can’t tell who was wrong. he died for a good cause after all. did it feel to you that he tried to help you specifically though? did it occur to him that you were even here. he never apologised ever, after all. the most stubborn jerk could’ve wrote a lied “i’m sorry” on a scrap of paper, but not he. was it pride or did he really not care at all?

TG: john is

TG: im not

_last lesson chump, or whatever he said on the roof, the basics are down._

  
_never said anything else besides how far the progress was. never knocked you out fully. never stopped when you begged. never stopped gifting you meticulously picked swords for your birthday. never stayed in the same room when you had enough courage to enter. never talked. never stayed out for too long._

  
_ever so uninterested to look you into the shades. ever so uncaring to get out of his room. ever so obsessed with the idea of transcending basic human needs; to top it off forcing his ridiculous fasts onto you. ever so talking garbage when falling asleep on the couch accidentally. and even then, when you felt dirty enough to eavesdrop, he just mumbled and slurred. nothing you could hold against him._

  
sleep-slurred sorries don’t count though. waking up sobs don’t count too.

GC: Y3S YOU 4R3!

TG: no

**Author's Note:**

> what if dirk stirder


End file.
